That summer, the summer all the rules began to change, June seemed to last for a thousand years. The temperatures were merciless: thirty-eight, thirty-nine, then forty in the shade. It was heat to die in, to go nuts in, or to spawn. Old folk collapsed, dogs were cooked alive in cars, lovers couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The sky pressed down like a furnace lid, shrinking the subsoil, cracking concrete, killing shrubs from the roots up…’

It’s weather. Or is it? I rather liked it, so why does she get away with it?

1 It’s interesting

Weather is usually not interesting. Most of the time in real life, weather is a conversational gambit used by those who wish they had something better to talk about. It’s throat clearing. It’s asking for permission for a conversation. It’s perhaps a plea for the other person to think of something less dull to talk about. In writing, it’s often a hesitant moment as the writer wonders exactly how to introduce everything. ‘Er, there was a blue sky…’

But here, Liz Jensen has made extraordinary weather. It’s hardly even weather, in fact – it’s a dangerous setting, a war with the environment that makes living perilous. It skews the familiar – like that off-kilter opening from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

2 It’s about people

We’re more curious about people than we are about things. Which would you rather hear – a story about a chair or a story about the people whose attic it ended up in?

In The Rapture, Liz Jensen makes her opening paragraph about the people and how their lives have been changed. Where normality is disrupted, a story is bound to happen. (In fact, this excerpt has a double dose of people because it turns out to be first person – but that’s not apparent here.)

3 A storyteller is luring us in

Opening paragraphs aren’t just about the events. Like the opening bars of a song, they’re an introduction to the writer’s voice. Liz Jensen’s piece is assured, phrased with pizzaz, visualised with an eye for the interesting. It persuades you to lie back and be charmed.

The writing world is full of rules and taboos and it’s easy to take them too literally. Beginning a story with weather isn’t the problem. Neither is looking in a mirror, describing a character, waking up or getting dressed. The problem is failing to be interesting, failing to show us characters, failing to convey a state of unease or instability and failing to cast a spell over the reader.

I love that you addressed this, Roz. I think we are so often held hostage by these industry taboos. We hear often that stories that begin with a) weather or b) someone waking, usually from a dream, are frowned upon. Are these techniques overused? Possibly? But it doesn’t mean you can’t “reinvent” them if done well. The more we learn about rules as writers, I think the more inclined we are to want to break them–to see that nothing is absolute if done effectively.

Hello Erika – lovely to see you! Totally agree. Just this afternoon I was listening to BBC Radio 4’s Open Book and a renowned crime writer read from the beginning of one of her novels. It started with – guess what – the character waking up. I think it’s unhelpful to make rules about scene situations – much better to make writers concentrate on how they want to ensnare the reader.

That is a great weather opening, Roz. And immediately, I flashed on the opening of White Oleander:
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blossoms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon.
“Oleander time,” she said. “Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.”

And just like your example, this opening accomplishes multiple tasks–setting, characterization, foreshadowing.

“The Planter’s Honey Roasted Peanuts tin had an ominous look about it. Pens in the World’s Best Dad coffee cup had all suddenly dried up. My Llasa Apso was looking at me funny. And then–” And then it frickin’ started raining all over my laptop as I sat in the park, on that one bench that’s not too sunny and not too shady, where sometimes that cute girl comes and pulls up her socks before jogging.

Does that count as a taboo to be avoided? What if the Llasa Apso were named Taboo in the story?What if I found it really interesting that the cute jogger girl always wears a half shirt to show off her pierced navel? Does that help or hurt my opening?

Help me bestselling ghostrider lady with the elegant neck scarf. I´m so confused.

I attended the Squaw Valley Writers Conference when Janet Fitch was speaking. She said she was in a writing group in which the members would take turns bringing a word for everyone to write on. At one particular meeting, someone brought the word “wind,” and White Oleander was the eventual result.

I like that opening a lot. And see how she shows not tells with surgical economy. Might have to put Liz Jensen higher up in my to-read pile… At least I’m getting through that pile quicker because of this year’s monsoony summer.

Weather’s a really tricky one. I think the real problem I have with weather passages is something this also suffers from – over-egging the metaphor, foreshadowing, commenting obliquely on the plot and characters through the weather. The problem is that it’s done so often that it is almost impossible for it to be fresh. The urban dystopia of Blade Runner was so good because it was the first time it was done on that scale – using pollution and neon and monotone, crumpled clothes as shorthand for a society gone wrong now makes you want to tear your hair out.

There’s also a danger of overwriting along “dark and stormy night” lines, and I think this passage skirts with both of those problems. “That” summer is such a cliche, from Suddenly Last Summer and Streetcar Named Desire all the way through to some things not written by Tennessee Williams like American Graffitt. Even one of my very favourite books, Betty Blue, almost lost me with a brooding stormclouds approaching opening.

On the other hand, weather can be done beautifully – no one can convey so much through a single sentence of falling rain as Murakami, for example. My very favourite weather moment is also rain, and also from Blade Runner, when Batty dies – but I don’t think rain could ever be used that way again – and that’s the real thing. With something as risky as weather you have to be new.

I think the real problem is that it is almost impossible to avoid falling into overwroughtness without sounding boring – and the best way to do this is once you have already established the context and your voice, which makes beginning with it really difficult. But by no means impossible

Hi Dan! Opening with dialogue? In some genres that’s perfectly fine, although I did see a very good argument for why it makes life difficult for the reader.

One reader’s overwrought is another reader’s delight. I know I have a high tolerance for intensity if the singer is good, so it’s nice to hear from someone who gets a little put off by this style.

Does the Blade Runner opening count here? Although it’s great for most storytelling discussions (as you well know), it’s a movie – and movies don’t work in the same way as prose. Prose is like dial-up – one sensation at a time – so the choice of what to show has to be made with that in mind. It’s also potentially a lot more intimate and less literal than a movie. Although I give you points for mentioning Blade Runner – and lovely Roy’s speech, which was partly written by Rutger Hauer.

If we’re talking stormy moments, who can forget the exit line of Terminator? I love that.

Beware the overly proscriptive, I often tell the tyro, but that one in particular I loathe.

“The Christmas of 182– was remarkable in Guernsey. It snowed on that day. In the Channel Islands, a winter where it freezes to the point of forming ice is memorable, and snow is an event. On that morning of that Christmas day, the road that skirts the seacoast from St. Peter to Le Valle was perfectly white. It had been snowing from midnight until dawn.”

“Saturday, it rained”

“In those last hot days of the spring of 1910″

“The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine”

Joe Konrath, whom I do not dislike, dreams of writing a beginning so beautiful.

“Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend — the weekend of the Yale game.”

“An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt, like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky — surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”

Isn’t it good? I thought you’d be bamboozled by it — you of all people, I mean. It’s too bad the rest of the story doesn’t quite match up to the beginning, and yet the whole beginning — the whole first chapter — is that good. The next few paragraphs continue describing the weather and the puddle:

It lies in shadow but contains a sample of the brightness beyond, where there are tree and two houses. Look closer. Yes, it reflects a portion of pale blue sky — mild infantile shade of blue — taste of milk in my mouth because I had a mug of that color thirty-five years ago.It also reflects a brief tangle of bare twigs and the brown sinus of a stouter limb cut off by its rim and a transverse bright cream-colored band. You have dropped something, this is yours, creamy house in the sunshine beyond.

When the November wind has its recurrent icy spasm, a rudimentary vortex of ripples creases the brightness of the puddle. Two leaves, two triskelions, like two shuddering three-legged bathers coming at a run for a swim, are borne by their impetus right into the middle where with a sudden slowdown they float quite flat. Twenty minutes past four. View from a hospital window.

November trees, poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold — because getting more of the falsely mellow sun in the higher air….

Whenever I see something opening with the weather, I think of “It was a dark and stormy night.” Unless the weather is an important part of the story, and the writer handles it very very well, it makes the reader roll their eyes – not a good start.

You might want to do a column on other openings that have become cliché:

A phone ringing.
An alarm clock going off.
A character looking in the mirror to provide the reader a physical description.
Things happening that turn out to be a dream. (I just recently started reading a book where the entire first chapter was fast and exciting and then turned out to be a dream. I didn’t bother with the second chapter.)

ho ho, he does give those opening horrors a good workout! But it’s interesting that you came up with that list independently. They seem to be pet hates. My point here (which I’m sure you appreciated) is that they don’t have to be bad beginnings.

I did have a few moments of opaque weather dialogue in a story recently, but it was used intentionally to illustrate the fact that the characters had no oasis, no safe bit of conversation between them, and could only seek refuge in this banal transaction.

I was making an oblique stab at the Invisible Obama incident–and his talking to the chair at the RNC…

It fits well with the tone and content of the rest of the story. My lesson learnt was about beta readers and choosing them carefully. I don’t want someone to be my reader if they are going to sound the klaxon because I violated Rule #167 and then basically not be able to evaluate from the point of this egregious foul. A year later, I still think the weather dialogue is the right one. A year later, I still think this reader was the wrong one.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.